The Master Switch

I had a computer science professor in college that praised big companies like AT&T and IBM because of all the amazing innovations they produced. Big companies, he argued, have a lot of money to put into R&D. Think about Bell Labs in 1948. In one year, both the transistor and communications theory are invented there. Stephen Johnson too praises universities and research labs like CERN, because they provide an open environment for wild ideas.

But, as Tim Wu--the law professor who coined the term 'net neutrality'--convincingly argues, this isn't the whole picture. Bell Labs clamped down on a number of innovations, such as the answering machine (first invented in the 1930's!) and the Internet, which only became a reality when JCR Licklider was hired at ARPA and made Paul Baran's packet-switching ideas a reality. AT&T did, of course, host the lines connecting the nodes of the ARPANET. But they could not be persuaded by Baran to move from a hierarchical system to a peer-to-peer system before then.

ARPANET in 1971

Companies tend to innovate within their area of dominance. Promoting any radically different technologies is risky. The radio companies understood this when television was invented. They got the FCC to regulate television to such a degree that only established players like NBC had a chance. Imagine what television could have been like if it wasn't legally required to have centralized networks that created a small amount of content for large audiences on an advertising model. An early YouTube, perhaps?

Communications technologies have three components: content production, distribution, and receiving technologies. During its monopoly, AT&T controlled both the lines and the receivers; ordinary people produced the content. Broadcast television had only three content producers who sent signals over airwaves which were picked up by televisions. Hollywood was so vertically integrated in the 30's and 40's that it produced the content, distributed movies, and owned the theaters that showed them. With the Internet today, there are many producers, a few connectors (such as Google), and consumer devices like smartphones and laptops.

It's easy to think that the Internet is radically different from other communications technologies, but Wu doesn't think so. Whenever a new technology comes out, people think it will cure the world of all its ills. The telephone connected even the most rural farmers to their neighbors on barbed wire fences, until AT&T drove these coops out of business. Cable television promised to democratize information and liberate us from the tyranny of the big three, but it's hard to think of cable TV as emancipatory today. Even Hollywood was founded on principles of openness and was the result of breaking up the Edison Trust motion picture monopoly.

The old Bell is the new AT&T

The more components of a communications technology that any one company owns, the more control they have over the flow of information. If the AOL-TimeWarner merge was not so ill-timed, the results could have been scary. One company would control the content, the connectors, and the access for millions of people. In effect, it would have a 'master switch.' Though many pundits worry about Google's ability to direct traffic to a few key sites, it would not be hard for content-producers to refuse to let Google index them. They could connect directly with consumer device producers, which is exactly what Apple has been trying to do.

To be honest, I never worried much about net neutrality before. But now that AT&T, Verizon (which is just AT&T East), and TimeWarner (a content-producer as well) are the main Internet service providers, they wield a great deal of power. The content-producers (YouTubers) and distributors (Google) both need AT&T and Verizon to connect. The Internet may share the same fate as all other communications technologies. And because it's become so ubiquitous that it's all the more important for it to be open. That's why I think I'll stick with my Android phone.

Other fun facts about open technologies:

• The explosion of movies like Midnight Cowboy was not just due to Americans watching French New Wave movies. It was probably more likely the abandonment of the Hollywood code in 1968. The code itself was only possible because there were so few movie producers.
•  FM Radio was invented in the 30's but so regulated by the FCC at the behest of NBC / RCA that it didn't become a viable option until the 70's, even though it had better sound quality with lower power consumption than AM Radio.
• The main reason TCP/IP caught on was that it was network agnostic. It was an ad hoc solution to an early problem of connecting disparate networks, but its longevity is due to its flexibility and abstractness.

The Reef and the Market

Philosophy professors like asking students where their ideas come from. "I just think them," students are bound to retort. "Aha!" The professor pounces. "But where does the idea of 'I' come from?"  Silence.

Much of philosophy involves trying to explain where various ideas come from. Socrates and Aristotle understood the advance of thought as a process of dialogue which builds upon the ideas of the past. René Descartes argued that the idea of God was at the root of all true ideas. Karl Marx thought many of our ideas, such as religion, are ideology and a product of power relations. W.E.B. DuBois believed that we understand ourselves and others through the lens of race and that these ideas have a contingent history. William James thought our ideas were a product of 'what worked' for us and people like us in the past. Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific theories belong to a history of evolving paradigms.

Stephen Johnson is concerned with good ideas in his book, Where Do Good Ideas Come From? There are three images of innovation that orient his inquiry. Coral reefs, which make up 0.1% of the Earth's surface but have support 25% of all marine species. There is the city, which, as Geoffrey West has shown, increases in innovation in relation to population at a super-linear rate. And there is the web, which has decreased the time required for innovating and adopting new technologies from 20 years to 2.

By looking at innovation from a number of different scales, including at the level of brains, cities, and, ecosystems, Johnson comes up with a framework I summarize in the following way.  Good ideas are fostered by:

• networks that can change
• that have some stability
• that favor chance encounters
• that embrace error
• that support re-use
• that support building on other good ideas

More creativity per capita than any suburb

How can businesses foster innovation? Johnson shows that the majority of major inventions in the last two hundred years did not happen in R&D labs at major firms or in the garages of people who later struck it rich. They usually took place in colleges and universities, or organizations like CERN. This was surprising to me, given my experience in the academy, its silos of rival departments, and its distance from the real world. However, universities do allow people from very different backgrounds to work together and to circulate and build upon others' ideas freely. They allow for experiments to go wrong and let people research controversial things.

Many businesses today taut the importance of innovation, but few allow for failure, the open exchange of diverse ideas, change, or time for reflection. A recent survey of CEO's showed that they spend around 50 hours a week working but have little time to reflect, given the constant interruptions of BlackBerries. Google, on the other hand, requires employees to work on their own projects 20% of the time. Twitter built an open API and then built their services on top of that. Apple, while opaque to outsiders, has a very messy development process where everyone at each step of the development chain is involved with a new product at the very beginning.

Twitter or GM?

More personally, Johnson's book caused me to reflect on when I'm most creative. I'm best in my sleep or in writing after having a discussion with someone. I need time to let ideas simmer, but I'm lucky enough to have lots of smart people to discuss ideas with. Johnson concludes:

"Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build or your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent.  Build a tangled bank."